Risk Quotations

"Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don't. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever."--Philip Adams

"Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory."--Alan Alda

"That's the risk you take if you change: that people you've been involved with won't like the new you. But other people who do will come along."--Lisa Alther

"Our lives improve only when we take chances-and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves."--Walter Anderson

"If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space."--Anonymous

"If a man will begin with certainities, he shall end in doubts: but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he whall end in certainties. They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea."--Francis Bacon

"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary."--Sir Cecil Beaton

"Creative risk taking is essential to success in any goal where the stakes are high. Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity."--Gary Ryan Blair

"For the truth is that I already know as much about my fate as I need to know. The day will come when I will die. So the only matter of consequence before me is what I will do with my allotted time. I can remain on shore, paralyzed with fear, or I can raise my sails and dip and soar in the breeze."--Richard Bode

"If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down."--Ray Bradbury

"Accept that all of us can be hurt, that all of us can-and surely will at times-fail. I think we should follow a simple rule: if we can take the worst, take the risk."--Joyce Brothers

"Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity; they seem more afraid of life then of death."--James F. Byrnes

"The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure thing boat never get far from the shore."--Dale Carnegie

"You must accept that you might fail; then, if you do your best and still don't win, at least you can be satisfied that you've tried. If you don't accept failure as a possibility, you don't set high goals, and you don't branch out, you don't try-you don't take the risk."--Rosalynn Carter

"Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing."--William Congreve

"To win without risk is to triumph without glory."--Pierre Corneille

"Courageous risks are life-giving, they help you grow, make you brave, and better than you think you are."--Joan L. Curcio

"We must dare, and dare again, and go on daring."--Georges Jacques Danton

"People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year."--Peter Drucker

"Please know I am quite aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others."--Amelia Earhart

"No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty."--George Eliot

Risk

"Only those willing to risk going too far can find out how far they can go."--T.S. Eliot

"Do not be too timid and squeamish... All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better."--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success."--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You've got to take the initiative and play your game...confidence makes the difference."--Chris Evert

"One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure."--John W. Gardner

"Don't be afraid to take a big step. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps."--David Lloyd George

"If you play it safe in life you've decided that you don't want to grow any more."--Shirley Hufstedler

"Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings."--Victor Hugo

"Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome."--Samuel Johnson

"If you don't risk anything, you risk even more."--Erica Jong

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."--Helen Keller

"There are costs and risks to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction."--John F. Kennedy

"During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk."--Soren Kierkegaard

"Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane."--R.D. Laing

"Take risks ... be willing to put your mind and your spirit, your time and your energy, your stomach and your emotions on the line. To search for a safe place, to search for an end to a rainbow, is to search for a place that you will hate once you find it. The soul must be nourished along with the bank account and the resume. The best nourishment for any soul is to create your own risks."--Jim Lehrer

"Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or idea, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk-and to act."--Maxwell Maltz

"Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth."--Katherine Mansfield

"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers."--Mignon McLaughlin

"Take chances, make mistakes. That's how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave."--Mary Tyler Moore

"All my life I have gone out on a limb, but I have turned the limb into a bridge, and there is cool, clear water flowing under."--Holly Near

"Nothing would be done at all if one waited until one could do it so well that no one could find fault with it."--Cardinal Newman

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."--Anais Nin

"When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take the step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen. There will be something solid for us to stand on or we will be taught to fly."--Patrick Overton

"One who sits between two chairs may easily fall down."--Russian Proverb

"If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success."--John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

"You've got to go out on a limb sometimes because that's where the fruit is."--Will Rogers

"You can become a winner only if you are willing to walk over the edge."--Damon Runyon

"Growth means change and change involves risk, stepping from the known to the unknown."--George Shinn

"Who bravely dares must sometimes risk a fall."--Tobias G. Smollett

"Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something."--Gertrude Stein

"Courage is not the towering oak that sees storms come and go; it is the fragile blossom that opens in the snow."--Alice M. Swaim

"I've found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often."--Brian Tracy

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."--Mark Twain

"Necessity is the mother of taking chances."--Mark Twain

"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center."--Kurt Vonnegut

"The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul."--Simone Weil

"Life isn't worth living unless you're willing to take some big chances and go for broke."--Eliot Wiggington